“Why did he just split like that?” Colin asked. “You two have-uh, had-been together a while now. Wasn’t it something you could have worked out between you?”
“I thought so, but he freaked. He didn’t want to be a daddy-no way, nohow.” Louise’s mouth twisted. “Sometimes you don’t find out what somebody’s really like till it’s crunch time. I got crunched, all right.”
“Yeah, you did. Sorry about that.”
“What am I going to do?” Her eyes filled with tears.
“Either you’ll have the baby or you’ll decide you don’t want to have it and you’ll take care of that.” Colin was no enormous fan of abortion. He could see, though, that a woman might not want to bear the child of a man who’d abandoned her-especially if she was a woman with some gray in her hair unless she touched it up. Raising a kid on your own was never easy. It got harder as you got older and tireder.
Through the tears, his ex looked indignant. She eyed him as if this were somehow his fault-or, at any rate, anyone’s but hers. “I can figure that much out for myself, thank you very much,” she said tartly. “What I wanted to know was how much help from you I could count on.”
“Huh? What kind of help? I’m not made of money, especially when I’m putting Marshall through school and he never seems to graduate.”
“But he sold that story! To a magazine! For money! Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Well, it’s pretty good. But what he got is not quite a week’s rent on his place, and that’s before you chop taxes out of it. Besides, you pretty much cleaned out my bank account when you left.” He’d kept the house. She’d taken just about everything else they’d built up over all the years they were married. The lawyers called it a fair split. Colin hadn’t loved lawyers before the divorce. He was even less fond of them now.
“You’re being mean!” Louise exclaimed.
He exhaled through his nose to try to hide how angry he was. “Louise, you walked out on me. You were in love with Teo, and he was in love with you, and the two of you were going to live happily ever after. You got your half of the community property. Except for that, you didn’t want thing one to do with me any more. Months could go by without us talking. But now Mr. Happily Ever After finds out you’ve got a bun in the oven, so he takes off. And all of a sudden I look a lot better by comparison, huh? Is that where we’re at, or did I miss something?”
“You’re not going to help me?” If the Mask of Tragedy had a voice, it would have been hers then.
“You were the one who didn’t want me darkening your towels any more. You called me every name in the book. We are divorced, remember? Why should I care about the bastard of the guy you left me for?”
“Never mind the baby,” she said impatiently. “Didn’t you love me?”
“Yeah. I did. Past tense. I loved you longer than you loved me, as a matter of fact. I was a mess after you dumped me.” Colin bit back several other things he might have said. This was more than bad enough without looking for ways to make it worse. The waitress chose that moment to bring the check, too. After she hurried away, he went on, “Now I’ve found somebody else, too. I’ll do the best I can with Kelly. I think we’ve got a decent chance. That’s about as much as anybody can hope for these days.”
“And so you’ll throw me under the bus.” Louise would have been a star in Victorian melodrama.
You did that to yourself. One more thing Colin swallowed. “Look,” he said, “if I have a little extra, maybe I can chip in something. But if you think I’m going to go one inch further than that, I’m here to tell you it ain’t gonna happen. It’s over, Louise. I’m sorry-Christ knows I’m sorry-but it is.”
She glared at him. “You are a cruel, hard man. Your Kelly doesn’t have the faintest idea what she’s getting into, poor thing.”
“For all I know, you’re right,” he answered. “But I’ll tell you one other thing.”
“What is it?” Louise spat the words at him.
“If I’d knocked you up, I wouldn’t’ve run out on you. And you know darn well that’s so.”
She did. He could see it in her face. He could also see that she would sooner have been dropped into the supervolcano than admit it. “Maybe you’d better take me back to work,” she said glacially.
“Okay.” He tossed a five on the table, then paid the bill at the register. Rain started spattering down as they walked across the lot to his car. He held the passenger-side door open for her. She got in with the air of Marie Antoinette heading for the guillotine.
Neither one of them said much as he drove north to Braxton Bragg Boulevard. Just before he turned in to the fortified lot, Louise murmured, “I wish… I wish things could have been different.”
“A lot of people do,” Colin agreed. Cops saw that every hour of every day. “But by the time they make the wish, it’s already too late. Take care of yourself, Louise, whatever you decide to do.”
“Like it matters to you!” she flared.
“It does,” he said. “We can’t go back to square one, though. You’ve got your life to live, and I’ve got mine, and they aren’t on the same track any more.”
She slid out and slammed the car door. Then she hurried inside; the rain was coming down harder now, and she didn’t have an umbrella with her. The guard nodded to Colin as he left the lot. He gave back a wave that was half a salute.
When he sat down at his desk again, Gabe asked, “Do I want to know how that went?”
Colin thought for a moment. “Even worse than I expected,” he said judiciously.
“Aii!” Gabe winced. “They said it couldn’t be done!”
“Oh, it could, all right.” In a few bleak words, as if he were summarizing a case on the witness stand, Colin explained how.
“Oh, man. Oh, wow, man.” Sanchez shook his head. “That happened to me, I wouldn’t’ve come back here. I’d’ve found somewhere quiet and got loaded.”
“I’m on city time now not on mine,” Colin said. “And I did too much drinking right after we broke up. It’s a bitch, all right, but she’s just not my problem any more.” He packed the words with more emphasis than he usually used. Was he trying to convince himself as well as his friend? He wouldn’t have been surprised.
“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” Gabe told him. “Now, are you gonna give your new squeeze the good news?”
That was a more interesting question than Colin really liked. Reluctantly, he nodded. “Don’t you think I’ve got to? If we’re going to make some kind of life together, she needs to know what’s going on with me.”
“I guess.” Gabe sounded anything but sure. “I don’t know who it’ll be rougher on, though, you or her.”
“Oh, my God, Colin! How totally awful for you!” Kelly exclaimed when her fiance reached the end of his story. Here and there getting through it, he’d sounded more like a machine running on clockwork than a flesh-and-blood human being. She had the feeling he couldn’t have made it through without shutting down most of what he was feeling.
“I’ve had lunches I enjoyed more,” he allowed. “Hey, I’ve had teeth pulled I enjoyed more.”
“I believe you. I wish I could be down there to give you a hug,” Kelly said.
“That’d be good,” Colin said. “So now I’ve got to set up a skip trace on this clown. Just what I want to do.” He couldn’t get it out of his mind.
“You could just tell her to forget it. She’s got a lot of nerve, dropping that on you after she sashayed out the door.” Kelly thought she needed to remind Colin of that. If Louise wanted to sashay back into his life, how interested would he be? They’d had a lot of years together. If she could work it so the ones that had passed since she left him somehow didn’t count…
Carrying her lover’s baby made that harder. But if she decided to visit a doctor, she wouldn’t have to carry it long. Then again, Colin had never struck Kelly as being good at forgetting.
His electronically transmitted sigh in her ear did everything a real one would have except ruffle her hair. “Hon, if some guy ran out on a woman I’d never heard of before and left her pregnant, I’d put out a skip trace on the so-and-so.” He sighed again. “I wish this were some gal I never heard of. I wouldn’t get all messed up inside dealing with her then.”